April 22, 2016

RPI Students Win First Place at NYSP2I R&D Competition. Undergraduates Hayleigh Sanders and Timothy Castiglia won first place at the New York State Pollution Prevention Institute’s 5th Annual R & D Student Competition, hosted at Clarkson University in Potsdam, NY on April 22, 2016. Their poster and demonstration, Automated Power Conservation and Color Temperature Control is a novel approach to LED lighting systems with the intention of power conservation to reduce the pollution generated by electricity production. The lighting system design automatically adjusts its brightness and color temperature relative to outdoor lighting conditions with the use of an Arduino microcontroller and I2C color sensor routed to the LED array. The color sensor is meant to be attached to a window to detect the RGB properties of ambient light entering a room to determine lighting needs. The LED array output brightness is programmed to be inverse to that of the brightness detected by the sensor, so that the LEDs become bright in low ambient light conditions (i.e. night) and dim in high ambient light conditions (i.e. daytime) to take advantage of natural light. Likewise, the LEDs replicate the color temperature of the ambient light detected by the color sensor to produce light compatible with the human circadian cycle for any given minute.